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Wikis // (M.Mohammad.Beigi)
Wikis If you want to find the most important site on the Web these days, look no further than Wikipedia.org (see Figure 4. I). As its name suggests, Wikipedia is an encyclopedia, one that really is attempting to store the "sum of human knowledge." By the time you read this, the English version of Wikipedia will house over 3 million separate entries with information about everything from the Aaadonta (a type of slug) to Zzzax (a fictional super villain from Marvel Comics). Every day, new entries are being added about people, places, things, historical events, and even today's news almost as it happens. It's truly an amazing resource. But whereas most people get the "pedia" part of the name, only a few really understand the first part, the "wiki." And believe it or not, that's the most important part, because without the wiki, this encyclopedia, this growing repository of all we know and do, could not exist. The word wiki is a short form of the Hawaiian wiki-wiki, which means "quick." Ward Cunningham created the first wiki in 1995, who was looking to design an easy authoring tool that might spur people to publish. And the key word here is "easy," because, plainly put, a wiki is a Web site where anyone can edit anything anytime they want. So, have some knowledge about your favorite hobby that isn't on Wikipedia? Add it. Read something you think isn't correct? Fix it. Don't like the way one of the entries is written? Erase it. Something big just happen in the news that is history making? Start a new entry. You have the power, because every time you access Wikipedia, or most any other wiki for that matter, you do so as editor in chief. And it's that freedom that has made Wikipedia the phenomenon it is as tens of thousands of editors in chief, people just like you and me, take on the job of collecting the sum of all human knowledge. Most everyone's first reaction to that is that it sounds more like Whackypedia. "If anyone can edit anything on the site any time they want, how in the world can you trust what you read there?" they ask. It's a great question. The answer is that, thankfully, there are vastly more editors who want to make it right than those who want to make it wrong. When mistakes occur or vandals strike, the collaborative efforts of the group set it straight, usually very quickly. University of Buffalo professor Alex Halavais tested this by creating 1 3 errors on various posts on Wikipedia, all of which were fixed within a couple of hours (Halavais, 2004). Pretty amazing, I'd say. Now, I know what you're thinking, something along the lines of "Well, I can skip this chapter, , cause this anyone-can-do-anything wiki thing will never work in my school." But, try t o resist the urge; wikis can b e pretty amazing and versatile. And if you believe as I do that doing real collaboration is something that every student needs to learn, keep reading. Take, for example, the Wikipedia entry created around the Indian Ocean earthquake that struck just after Christmas 2004 and created the tsunami that killed more than 175,000 people. It may have happened over five years ago now, but it was without question the event that made clear to me that we were living in a much different information world as I turned to Wikipedia to watch the event unfold. The earthquake occurred just after midnight (GMT) on December 26, and the first 76-word post was created at Wikipedia about nine hours later. Twenty-four hours after the first mention, the entry had been edited more than 400 times and had grown to about 3,000 words, complete with some of the first photographs of the devastation, a chart documenting the dead and injured, and other graphics describing how the tsunami was spawned. Forty-eight hours after the first post, the entry had grown to more than 6,500 words, had been edited 1 ,200 times, and contained more than a dozen graphics including video of the wave itself. Six months after the event, more than 7,000 changes had been recorded, and the post had settled at around 7,200 words. All of it had been created and re-created by people just like you and me who were interested in contributing what they were finding to the entry. It was without question the most comprehensive resource on the Web about that horrific event. And that process is being repeated over and over as news happens around us. It's how each of Wikipedia's millions of entries in over 200 languages have evolved-from the hands of people just like us with the concept that everyone together is smarter than anyone alone. In the process, we check facts, provide "soft" security by acting like a community watchdog, and weed out bias and emotion from the posts in an attempt to arrive at a neutral point of view for each article. Each entry is the group's best effort, not any one person's. In that way, Wikipedia is the poster child for the collaborative construction of knowledge and truth that the new, interactive Web facilitates. It is, to me at least, one of the main reasons I believe in the transformative potential of all of these technologies. No one person, or even small group of people, could produce Wikipedia, as currently edits appear at a rate of around 400,000 a day. Every day, thousands of people who have no connection to one another engage in the purposeful work of negotiating and creating truth. They do this with no expectation that their contributions will be in some way acknowledged or compensated, and they do it with the understanding that what they contribute can be freely edited or modified or reused by anyone else for any purpose. The extent to which this happens and to which it is successful is truly inspiring. THE CHALLENGE OF WIKIPEDIA IN SCHOOLS Before we talk about building our own wikis with students, a couple of more thoughts on Wikipedia. Already, students are turning to Wikipedia as a resource for research, much to the chagrin of many teachers and librarians. As we've already discussed with blogs, knowing what sources to trust is becoming a much more labor-intensive exercise, and wikis, with many often anonymous authors, make that even more difficult. The idea that "it might be wrong" is a tough one for most people to overcome. Yet Steve Jobs, the CEO of Apple, has called Wikipedia one of the most accurate encyclopedias in the world (tinyurl.com/33uqlh). What to do? For one, teachers should spend some time checking Wikipedia's accuracy on their own. If your experience is anything like mine has been, you may end up agreeing with Jobs. But this stiJI takes a faith that we didn't need in the days before the interactive Web, a faith that collectively we can produce information that is as high quality as what a trusted few produced in the past. It's a tough call. The early consensus among educators seems to be to tell students to use Wikipedia as a starting point for their work, but not as a sole resource. The additional challenge with Wikipedia is that each of its entries is, in fact, a collaboratively written research report. It's not exposition in the sense that the entries are defending a thesis-just the opposite, in fact. Wikipedia's whole intention is to foster a neutral point of view in every entry. But say you assign students to do reports on a specific country-Argentina, for instance. All the pertinent reporting about Argentina may have already been done and collected at Wikipedia. So in this case, is it more important for a student to be able to find that information and know how to evaluate it, or to know how to repeat work that's already been done? Again, it's a tough call. A final challenge is changing the way we think about the content our own students create. Should we be encouraging them to contribute what they learn and know to the Wikipedia entry on that topic? Think about it. [f your student produces a great research paper on global warming, why shouldn't she add what she found to the global warming entry at Wikipedia? And why shouldn't we watch together to see what happens to that information that she adds? If it gets modified, we can think critically about those modifications. [f it gets spammed (which is highly unlikely) we can come to the rescue. Either way, it can be a great learning experience. (And by the way, for younger kids, they could edit or add their work to Simple English Wikipedia at Simple.Wikipedia.org.) If we begin to look at Wikipedia as another opportunity for our students to contribute what they learn and know to a larger audience, [ think we can begin to appreciate it for the really incredible site that it is. WIKIS IN SCHOOLS So what about it? Are you ready to begin thinking about how a wiki might work in your classroom? Hopefully, despite the seemingly chaotic design of wikis, you're starting to imagine the possibilities here. So, before taking a look at the ways in which some forward-thinking . teachers have he en using wikis in their classrooms, let's talk about some of the more obvious concerns. Namely, what would stop someone from anonymously going onto a class-run wiki and vandalizing it by erasing content or by adding profanities, for instance? There is no doubt that teachers on the K-12 levels are going to be hard pressed to justifY the use of such an open venue for the publication ofstudent work. However, a s we'll see, there are some who are doing just that. In theory, the "soft security" model could work in schools as well. If it's used as a group collaboration site it la Wikipedia, the class as a whole could monitor the content that is added and make the necessary edits and revisions. Giving students editorial control can imbue in them a sense of responsibility and ownership for the site and minimize the risk of someone adding something offensive. In fact, wiki projects in schools have worked best when the teacher loosens the reins a bit and lets students manage the content on the site. As much as we'd like to trust our students to make good things happen, however, we all know that it would only take one parent to open the wiki and find something inappropriate to derail the project. The good news is that there are alternatives. Although wiki purists scoff at the idea, there are a number of Web-based wiki sites that feature a password and login system similar to Weblogs for people to interact with the site. Or, similar software can be installed on your server and run locally. It's still a much more open and collaborative environment once inside, but in this way you can restrict who can and cannot access the site. Wikis pose some pedagogical challenges as well. They can be so effective at fostering collaboration that the teacher really needs to carefully examine her role in their use. As I noted previously, early implementations of wikis in educational settings have shown that the more autonomy teachers give to students in terms of negotiating the scope and quality of the content they are creating, the better. It's a very democratic process of knowledge creation. In using wikis, students are not only learning how to publish content; they are also learning how to develop and use all sorts of collaborative skills, negotiating with others to agree on correctness, meaning, relevance, and more. In essence, students begin to teach each other. Teachers who impose a lot of right and wrong on that process can undermine the effectiveness of the tool. (For further discussion of the pedagogical potentials see tinyurl.com!2zu6fb.) And remember, if the openness of wikis feels a bit too disruptive, wikis can be used in many other contexts inside schools as well. As we'll see, they can be used as collaborative tools among teachers or districts to collect and share information. EXAMPLES OF WIKIS IN K-1 2 EDUCATION Among the teachers using wikis in schools, few have done more than Vicki Davis at Westwood High in Camilla, Georgia. Her computer classes use the Westwood.Wikispaces.com site to complete many of their projects and as a portal for assignments and relevant links to many other sources. But even more, Vicki has started to use wikis to connect her students to other learners from around the world, and her "Flat Classroom" project wiki from 2007 (flatclassroomproject.wikispaces.com) and her Horizon Project from 2008 (tinyurl.coml2knznm) are great examples. The first title comes from Thomas Friedman's The World Is Flat and the idea was to have her students study some of the "flatteners" that Friedman describes in terms of how they play out not only in their local lives in Georgia but for students in other parts of the globe. So she connected with Julie Lindsay, a teacher then in Bangladesh, and together they connected their students for a two-week investigation, the results of which are reported in the wiki. As you dig through the site, you'll find a comprehensive collection of narratives and essays, audio, and video-all produced collaboratively by teams of kids from disparate geographies. It's really good stuff. And when you see it, you'll also see why a wiki makes perfect sense for delivering this kind of work. The students worked together in the same environment. They could edit and add to each other's work seamlessly. The pages were easy to build and grow. And best of all, it's an environment that is easy to share with large audiences. Pretty cool. Or, take a look at Louise Maine's wiki work at her school in Punxsutawney, Pennsylvania. She and her freshman biology students are tracking their work from class, sharing links, posting results to experiments, and basically building a text for their course (tinyurl.comlnr9 l yr). More importantly, her students are learning the literacies of collaboratively constructing content as they work with her to add value to the site. While only her students can edit it, the wiki is open for anyone in the world to view. WIKI TOOLS FOR SCHOOLS If you want to give wikis a try in your classroom, you may want to start at the Wikispaces.com site. (After playing here for a bit to get your feet wet, you may want to think about trying Wetpaint.com as welL) At this writing, they have given away over 1 80,000 ad-free wikis to educators, and you can follow this link to get your own: tinyurLcoml293h9a. As you can tell from most of the examples above, Wikispaces is already pretty popular with classroom teachers, though there are some alternatives we'll discuss later. Creating your wiki is as easy as filling in the form on the page linked above, a process that takes maybe 45 seconds if you're a fast typist. (A minute if not.) Enter a username, a password, and a working e-mail address, click the "yes" button to make a wiki, give your wiki a name (no spaces allowed, by the way), select the type of wiki you want (most educators pick "protected" to start), click the box to certify that you're using it for educational purposes, and you're up and running. All you need to do is click the "Edit This Page" icon when your wiki site appears and you can start creating the content on your site. Using the editing toolbar, you can do some basic formatting of your text, but even better you can easily add audio and even video to your page. (You can even add a Google Calendar if you like-very cool.) Just click on the little TV-looking icon and follow the instructions on the dialog box that pops up. And, you can easily upload files or pictures up to 20 MB in size from your computer right onto the page. Use the picture icon to do that. Now, one of the most important aspects of building wikis is the ability to easily add subpages and layers to your site. Wikispaces makes this very easy. Say you want to create a separate page for your students to collaborate on a skateboarding essay. And, you want that essay linked from the front page of your site. All you need to do is type the words "Skateboarding Essay" somewhere on the page, highlight it, and then click the link icon on the toolbar. In the dialog box that pops up, you'll see the highlighted text in the "Link Text" line, and then you'll also see it listed in the "New Page Name" line. Just click "OK," then save the page, then click on the linked "Skateboarding Essay" that shows up. It will take you to a new page where all you (or your students) have to do is-you guessed it-click on "Edit This Page." (Remember, when you want to create a link to another Web page, choose the "external link" tab from the pop-up box that appears when you click the link icon.) OTHER WIKI TOOLS AND RESOURCES As I said before, there are a whole slew of different wiki programs that you can choose from ifWikispaces or PBwiki don't fit the bill. The best list that I 've found is the Wiki Engines list at tinyurl.coml34584q. (Note: You may want to visit the site with whoever runs your servers.) Finally, there are a few other interesting and cool wiki-type tools I'll mention that you might want to take a look at. First, there is Webnote, which is like an online Post-it note repository (tinyurl.coml4w8eo). Basically, you go to the site, create a page name in the form, and click "Load" to get started. You can add a Post-it by clicking the little yellow icon in the upper left and then double-clicking in the yellow Post-it-type box that appears. You can include basic HTML inside the boxes, and you can color code your notes for easy sorting. All of your notes are totally searchable, so you might want to think about creating some standard tag words to add as you go along. But the coolest thing about Webnote is that you can easily save snippets of text from Web pages you might be visiting. Here's how: The first time you go to your notes page, type "B" and a note will appear with a link for a bookmarklet. Drag the link to your "Links" toolbar on your browser, and the next time you're visiting a page and you find some text you want to save to your Webnote page, just highlight it and click that link. Automatically, you'll be taken to your note page and you'll see your highlighted text in a box with a link to the source. Cool, huh? If you want to edit that note, just double-click it. Now why is this a wiki? Because anyone who knows where your page is can come in and add, edit, or delete notes. That's right. Anyone. Good news is that makes it easy to share the space. Bad news is, well, you know the risks by now. But again, if someone comes in and destroys the content on the page, you can always revert back to the last correct version. So, although Webnote may be a bit too open for student use, you could create a Webnote page for group study or research with other teachers, and you can even subscribe to the RSS feed for that page to monitor what they are posting.